Wordwatch: Tailgate
When the Euro 2020 semi-final took place at Wembley earlier in the month, football fans were reported to be illegally gaining entrance to the stadium by “tailgating” other fans who held tickets. Here’s a newish word that, for once, I can trace back to its source from personal experience.
When I lived in the United States in the 1970s, visitors to the local (American) football game would arrive in their cars and queue, one vehicle behind another, almost touching the “tailgate” of the one in front, to get into the ground.
The tailgate of a vehicle is the door, or flap, at the back of a truck or car that can be opened or removed to receive goods. We would call it a “hatchback” here. Americans used the word as a verb to apply to the practice of queuing in vehicles, and I don’t think their idiom came over here much before the turn of the century. Now, lo and behold, it is firmly established as a common term and in this context has no connection with vehicles of any sort.
Individuals, or pedestrian groups, can crowd up close to someone in front, in order to follow them, and the implication is that the “tailgating” is performed for an illegal purpose. I wonder when the word will acquire the connotation of dishonest behaviour? It almost seems to have done so already.
I have a question for those of you who regularly follow American sports: how often do commentators at football and baseball games have occasion to use the term “tailgating”? I’d guess it was rare; something you encounter among the crowds trying to get into a game or match, not a feature of the game in play at a stadium or pitch. So how have we picked it up? Does it occur frequently in films and soaps? Have we simply listened to what our American friends say in our company or have a large number of us attended games in the States and come home, full of admiration and excitement, burbling the jargon?
Just asking. The spread of new vocabulary – and at such speeds nowadays! – perpetually fascinates me. And although I heard the word in use in America half a century ago, it wasn’t me, honest.